


Expensive Mistakes

by rosiedoesfic



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Borderline crack, Humour, M/M, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-18 20:24:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16126082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosiedoesfic/pseuds/rosiedoesfic
Summary: Short, absurd fic inspired by the @falloutboy Instagram's recent penchant for captioning photos with distinctly Patroh infused commentary.





	Expensive Mistakes

**Author's Note:**

> For Katie, because she bullied me into doing this.
> 
> Written largely in a fever dream...

**Expensive Mistakes**

_ But out of every pretty pretty miscalculation _ _  
_ _ You have got to be my all-time favorite _

  
  
  


"Listen -"

Patrick beamed up at them, umpteenth glass of champagne dangerously loose in his fingers, his lilac bowtie draped around his neck and the posy in his lapel mangled from the manful hugs he'd been giving everyone at the reception. Joe was face down in a flowerbed, somewhere, talking to a rosebush about the importance of give and take in a relationship ' _ If you catch my drift' _ , but he was happy, so that wasn't the issue, right now.

"What?" Patrick asked. "Wait, did I thank you for coming? Like, I am  _ so glad _ , y'know - I am so glad I got to -  _ we _ got to share this with you. Both. Of you. Hold up a second - where's my drink?"

"You're  _ holding it _ ," Andy told him, through gritted teeth, and then had second thoughts and plucked it from his fingers.

Patrick just frowned at him, perplexed, like Andy had just done some kind of magic.

"Okay. Dude. Sharpen up a second," Pete tried again, clicking his fingers in front of Patrick's nose. "We need to talk."

"We should. We should  _ definitely  _ talk more."

"Yeah. So. Can we talk about how your beard is gone?"

Patrick's eyes went wide and he smoothed at his face in bewilderment. "What?! Where - where -?"

"Oh my God, you are an idiot."

" _ Patrick _ ," Andy cut in, leaning his hand on the arm of the couch Patrick was sprawled on, "he isn't talking about the winterbeard, you shaved that months ago. He's talking about the woman you just pretended to marry. She has gone. She left. Still in the fucking  _ dress _ , mind you."

"And I could see the dollar signs in her eyes from like, the other side of the room."

Patrick frowned at them again, looking from face to face, and then, as if a thousand volts had been shot up his ass, he sat bolt upright. "SHIT!"

\---

Joe didn't remember much about the night before. He could taste earth, weirdly, but he didn't know why and he couldn't hear if anyone was telling him, because a brass band was playing inside his head.

He lifted his cheek from the pillow a little at the sound of retching from the hotel bathroom, but it made the world spin, so he put it back down and closed his eyes.

"You okay, babe?" he called, cringing at the volume of his own voice.

From the bathroom there was just the sound of more retching, which was a succinct enough answer.

When he mustered enough strength to squint one eye open, he could see his morning suit laid over the chair, which seemed reasonable enough, except for Patrick's also being laid out on the next seat, and as Joe couldn't even remember what happened the night before, he sure as hell hadn't had the wherewithal to do that, too.

Tentatively, he sat up, immediately regretting it - both for the fact that he suddenly wanted to fight his new husband for the bathroom, and the fact that Andy was propped against the dresser at the end of the bed with his arms folded. Something was afoot. Something truly horrible. And he really wasn't sure he was ready to know.

\---

"I'm just going to say, I told you from the start that this was a terrible idea," Bob said, with absolutely no remorse for 'I told you so'-ing them at a time like this. "I just expected Pete to be the one to fuck up this badly, not you two."

"Yeah, so, you're right, we're wrong - whatever, Bob - you're our manager, can't you just fucking…  _ manage _ ?"

"Cool it, toots," Pete intervened, patting Patrick's shoulder, "he's already on damage control."

"There are three ways you can deal with it. You can give in and pay her off - which is just encouragement; expensive encouragement - or you can sue her from breach of an NDA, which - honestly, just don't bother because you may as well sky write the damn story, if you do - or you can grow the fuck up and just… be honest about it."

"Fine. We'll just… pay her off," Patrick announced, and Joe cast him a hard look, before wincing and putting is head back in his hands.

"Five mil? You got that in the bank, Stump?"

"FIVE?!"

"For five million dollars she better have shots of the freckle on my taint," Joe muttered, not lifting his head.

"No, I hid those," Patrick muttered back, absently. "But I mean - that would be basically everything. All our liquid assets."

"Then I guess you're going to have to tell people what _seventy-five percent_ of the people who have met you already know."

"Can't we just, like, negotiate? Like… give her something to keep her quiet and then… I don't know. Hire an assassin or something?"

Bob's eyes narrowed at the top of Joe's head. "Just in case, I'm gonna point out that this would be illegal. Extremely illegal."

"Isn't blackmail?!" Joe demanded, sitting up hands spread.

"Yes. But if you go to the police, you just get outed anyway. That's why the blackmail thing works."

\---

"It pisses me off that we had to give her  _ anything _ ," Joe complained, from the couch in the living room, while Patrick brought in two glasses of water and a whole box of Advil. He settled at the opposite end, so their legs were muddled together in the middle. "I mean, why not just not be a fucking dick, basically?"

"I can't believe I trusted her…" Patrick said, feeling the betrayal keenly, under his sternum. "I thought we were friends, y'know? I thought she wanted to help us out because she cared - I mean, it isn't like she didn't get the lifestyle she wanted…"

Sighing, Joe opened his arms and reached out to encourage Patrick to crawl up to him. They snuggled down together, a mess of elbows and knees, and Joe kissed his temple tenderly. "We all did, dude."

"And it's just… I like what we have, right now, I don't want it to change, I - "

"I know. I know, so do I."

"You saw how they treated Ash…"

"You're preaching to the choir, man, I know."

Patrick took a long breath and snuggled closer against Joe's back, pressing his cheek to his shoulder. "Then, I don't know what else to do."

\---

Meanwhile, hunched over their Macbooks, Pete and Andy were scouring the archives.

"You know, this would have been way fucking easier if you hadn't spent the past decade and a half covering for these dumbasses…" Andy said, saving yet another image to the cloud. "Because now we have to compete with the 'wolf' you've been crying the whole time."

"Sure, sure, because I mean - you saw the histrionics earlier, right? That would have  _ in no way  _ caused some sort of breakdown ten years ago, kind of…"

"Maybe it would have just made them man up."

"They bought a house and it didn't, soooo...."

Andy sighed. It was, unfortunately, a valid point. How the two most risk-averse, change-phobic people on Earth had ever even gotten together was still waiting to be decoded, alongside the Voynich Manuscript and the Dorabella Cypher. But they were, and they had been for a long time, and the dutiful friend in him was mad, but nonetheless committed to fixing their bullshit for them, seeing as they weren't capable of rational thought themselves.

"How many do we have, now?"

"Um… two-hundred and thirty seven. That has to be enough, right?"

"I mean, assuming we have the equivalent in yards of tinfoil, I guess..."

Pete gave a wide, toothy grin. "You ready, dude?"

"As I'll ever be, I guess…"

"Cool. Pass me my phone…"

Silently, Andy took a moment to mourn the band and the friendships he was half-certain they were about to cause permanent destruction to, in an effort to save the two kids they'd chaperoned around the world for the past decade or two, from their own stupid selves.

\---

It took a couple of days to filter through. Joe hadn't really logged into his Instagram for months, and despite the usual onslaught of pictures of himself from fifteen years ago, re-cropped and filtered with vaguely offensive captions, there was something that stood out. He clicked on the band's account and looked at the image. It was a fairly ordinary one, from a show on the tour they'd just done, presumably from the middle of  _ Sugar _ , because it looked as though they'd been doing their little routine. Only, somehow they'd been caught with Patrick gazing up at him, apparently rapt, his lip sucked between his teeth while Joe looked away, unconcerned.

Beneath it, was the caption, "find yourself someone who looks @ you like @patrickstump looks at @jtrohman".

His first thought was,  _ Aw. _ His second thought was,  _ Pete, you are a fucking dead man. _

With rising panic, he kept scrolling. And then there was another one.

It was him and Patrick and Pete, standing backstage somewhere - he knew it was recent, but he wasn't sure when - Patrick gazing up at him adoringly as he made what looked like a typically stellar pop-culture reference at him and Pete darted out of the way. This one was captioned, too.

"@jtrohman giving @patrickstump a v important pep talk"

And then another, Patrick's eyes fixed on Joe again, with a bored-looking Andy propped beside them.

"When @jtrohman speaks, @patrickstump (intently) listens"

_ As if _ , Joe snorted to himself, but he kept on scrolling and the pictures kept on coming, each with distinctly questionable captions alluding to their relationship in varying degrees of explicitness.

He wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but he wasn't taking the rap for hiding it.

"Uh… Ric?" he called out to the kitchen, where Patrick was fixing himself a sandwich. "Can you come see this, real quick?"

\---

The main reason it was hard not to laugh, was because the nearly-hysterical yelling through his phone made Pete imagine an old-fashioned cartoon from the forties, where the telephone receiver morphed into the mouth of the calling party and spouted incoherent jabbering noises.

"Dude. Dude, it's all good, I have a plan, okay?"

"A fucking plan to out us?!"

"Well. Actually, yeah."

"Pete, you cannot  _ do that _ to people! That's fucking - why can you never  _ ask _ before making unilateral decisions that could totally - "

"I mean, I feel like this conversation is working out to be a great example of why not, honestly…"

" _ Because it makes people mad _ when you try to control their lives for them!"

"I noticed. But the thing is, your life is waaaay fucking out of control and you need me to figure this shit out for you, buddy. And it's gonna be fine, okay? Did you even read the comments on those things? The kids are like, so down for you two to be a whole thing, man. I mean, some of the comments were pretty spi…" He stopped and cast him a dubious look. "Actually, you know what? Maybe  _ don't  _ read them, just take my word for it, kind of…"

"Oh God… Pete, do you have any idea what you've done?"

"I mean, I feel like odds are 3:2 saved your ass and made you both Not Broke Forever."

What Pete didn't tell him was that this was only Phase 1a.

\---

"I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed," Joe drawled at Andy, sitting in the green room backstage at some late night show they'd agreed to do for some reason, at peak crisis.

"Well, if it makes you feel any better, I am  _ super _ mad," Andy replied, "that I have to fix this shit for you guys."

"I thought you were gonna say you were Superman, then, which would have been a way cooler place to take this conversation."

"No, the cooler place to take this conversation would be the place where you acknowledge that like, a week of drama is way less of a problem than a whole lifetime of it."

Joe frowned at him, looking oddly hurt. "It's not about 'a week of drama', douchenozzle. It's about not wanting this whole thing ruined by some bratty kids being upset that the whole charade Pete's had going on for years isn't actually for real. We're happy.  _ He's _ happy, man, and I don't want… I don't want him upset, when we only just put it on contract, basically."

"Neither do we. What we  _ want _ is for you guys to use this as a chance to embrace that whole thing. Joe, you got fucking  _ married _ . If now isn't the time, when is?"

"Well, I would say, 'When we decide it is' but some Judas witch thought it'd be super awesomely cool to take the choice away from us and use it to their advantage, so…"

"I know," Andy sighed, ruffling his hair and feeling sorry for him for the first time that day. "Maybe take it as a blessing in disguise, you know, man? Maybe this is the push you both needed to throw off the shackles or something."

Joe shrugged and arched an eyebrow at him, challengingly. "Maybe I'm into shackles."

\---

Phase 1b did not come with prior warning. It was best that way, in Pete's opinion, because then it'd seem like a genuine incident, rather than a carefully orchestrated set up. He did, however, make sure that he was in the same room as Patrick and a defibrillator when the 'leak' to their cloud folder broke.

He kind of wished he'd covered his bases with a bunch of asthma inhalers, too, because the deathglare Patrick was giving him was even more terrifying half concealed behind a brown paper bag.

"You fucking asshole," he wheezed, between gasps for air. "I am gonna need that money she wants, for the lawyer who's gonna help me get away with murdering you."

"I'm recording this conversation," Pete shrugged, wondering if it was worth the risk of putting it on Instagram live.

"You can record my goddamn ass, you fucking sociopath."

Pete's ears pricked up. "Ooh. Oooooh! Yeah - yeah, do you have like, a video already, or…?"

"What?"

"A sextape, man, c'mon. Everyone has a sextape - that'd be genius."

The only thing that stopped Patrick caving in Pete's face in that moment was that he stood up too quickly while hyperventilating and fainted.

\---

"The whole thing?" Joe asked, mopping at Patrick's sweaty forehead with a cool, wet cloth, as his head rested in his lap.

"A folder. With all our old pics in. Like, literally hundreds."

"Oh."

"Every picture they took of us together in fifteen years, Joe. All of them."

"But there are like, none of that time when they…? And we were in that pool, that time…?"

"I don't know! Probably."

"Are any of them, like… obvious?"

"Well, they seemed obvious to me!"

"Yeah, but you know we were doing The Sex that whole time, so like… probably it's always gonna be obvious for you."

"That's not the point!"

"So, what was the point, babe, I can't really, like…?"

"Ideas. He's feeding them the  _ idea _ that we've been secretly in love with each other this whole time."

"Um," Joe started, lifting the face cloth and peering down at him, confused. "I'm just gonna throw this out there, but like… we have? Haven't we,  _ husband _ ?"

"Of course, but they don't know that!"

"Huh?"

Patrick finally sat up, looking a tiny bit like he might want to choke him. "Joe, seriously. He's putting in the groundwork with people - letting them think it'd be some kind of cute if we'd had this whole secret crush on each other forever."

"Right…? Why?"

"So that when they find out we're married, it seems like a happy ending, not a scandal."

"Oh." Joe thought about what he'd said carefully for a minute. "Well, I mean, that could work… and um, while we're on the subject of happy endings…?"

\---

There were times in life when Andy was pretty sure that if Pete had the attention span for it, he could have been history's most terrifying supervillain. He couldn't believe what he was seeing. He'd been on sites like this before - he knew what this shit was - and Pete was gleefully scrolling him through an index screen, page after page after page of submissions dated in the past few weeks.

"You sick, genius bastard."

"I know, right?"

"I can't believe it's working…"

Pete pouted and frowned at him as he leaned over his shoulder to read the summaries on the page. "How come you 'can't believe it's working'? Of course it's working, it was my plan!"

"So was announcing the album in cinema trailers."

"It is  _ not  _ my fault if school don't teach abstract problem solving, anymore!"

Andy wasn't sure they'd taught it when Pete was at school, which was how they'd gotten into this goddamn mess.

"Trust me, man! Five hundred weirdos with creepily accurate imaginations can't all be wrong…"

"Hmm." Andy thought it best to keep quiet and hope that it panned out the way he was expecting, and that the mercenary traitor who'd instigated all of this didn't catch wind of what they were doing and drop her bombshell too early.

\---

Phase 2, as it turned out, was easier than expected. There was, inevitably, a certain level of foot-stomping and refusal right up until the announcement was drafted, because Pete knew there was no way Patrick  _ or _ Joe were going to let him word their story for them - especially not when he wrote a deliberately graphic version to illicit the kind of controlling panic that was required to get Patrick on board.

Pete's plan to drip-feed the truth as Instagram's first soap opera seemed to be working well. It had been fairly easy to turn the thing into a 'running joke' in which each Instagram post became a panel in the lame romance stories in Hillary's girls' magazines, back in the '90s. A picture of the two of them at dinner with the rest of the tour crew, co-incidentally sitting behind one of the candles dotted along the table, became a romantic meal and a lesson to treat your SO right. A picture of them on the plane, slumped against each other's shoulders, was tagged with '#boyfriendgoals' and one of Joe staring intently at his phone was captioned with 'checking to see when bae gets back from the @billboard interview', immediately following a picture of Patrick noting he was at an interview with Billboard.

The commentary on each post was increasingly hysterical, but none of it was negative. Mostly, it was wild finger-pointing at Pete, and capslocky shrieking about how adorable they were. Neither of which felt like a bad thing, because he was totally down to take the credit.

The post itself was of The Pill Scene from the Matrix, Morpheus with faint images of the two of them photoshopped on to the lenses of his sunglasses, courtesy of Spencer, with a swipe from the right supplying a second image. They'd tried one of the wedding photos, but it just looked absurd, and they'd tried photos from years ago, but everyone had already seen those and critically analysed every frame after they'd leaked them, so they'd tried a cute photoshoot and that had been flat out terrible. But in between the shots, in a moment of weariness, Joe had pulled Patrick to him for a hug and kissed his forehead, and Elliot had been smart enough to capture it. That was the image they used.

And below it, the caption, 'what if I told you… Patroh is real?'

\---

There wasn't much of a reaction, at first, or indeed, at all - mainly because this dumb shit had been going on for so long that only the most tinfoil-encased in the fanbase took it at all seriously. Although, it had to be asked what kind of Magneto-grade protection the ones who denied it was in any way possible because Patrick was definitely in love with Pete must have gotten hold of. And there was something glorious about sitting on a beach in Hawaii, with no access to the internet and no meddling friends, on a honeymoon that they both agreed they'd thoroughly earned.

Patrick's beard had been trimmed down to size, and boy, had Joe been smug when he sat in on that phone call, listening to her shrill objections to their not playing fair, while their lawyer gave her the legal definition of blackmail.

So, they had a pleasant couple of weeks in the sun, didn't get eaten by any sharks at all, and returned home to find… still nobody believed that they were together.

Even when photos of Patrick's milk-white legs in swim shorts in a photo of him rubbing suntan lotion onto Joe's back, or Joe fighting with a boiled spider crab while they had a  _ real _ romantic dinner date at a local restaurant were shared by a gossip blogger, people were… disconcertingly underwhelmed.

"They don't think I  _ could  _ get you," Patrick decided, one morning, sulking at his laptop while he ate a toasted bagel for breakfast.

"You're the  _ only one _ who gets me," Joe reminded him. "That's why I married you." He squidged a hand at his butt as he walked from cupboard to cupboard. "I mean, like,  _ mostly _ . Where did you put the peanut butter?"

"In the peanut butter cupboard…"

Joe opened the cupboard where they kept the canned food, sighed at the jar next to the tomatoes and moved it back to the correct cupboard, before realising he actually needed it, and taking it back out.

"I just… I thought they'd be mad, but they're not mad, y'know? They just… literally don't believe it."

"Maybe they don't believe I could get  _ you _ ," Joe offered, scowling at the severe lack of peanut butter in the jar in his hand. "I mean, you're the one they're all like, 'oooowoooo, pumpkin-spice peach baby' over… for some reason."

\---

"This was your idea, Pete, you need to fix it."

Pete started up at Patrick from where he was sprawled across his own couch, still in his pyjama shorts and a tank top with baby puke on it.

"Fix it? How the fuck do I fix it?"

"I don't know! You're the evil genius, you got us into this mess, so get us out."

"Can't you just, like, post a bunch of 'bae caught me sleepin' stuff on your Instagrams or something?"

"We did! They laughed."

"I mean, what's the big deal? It isn't like they're giving you shit for it - wasn't that the thing you were kind of like, freaking out about?"

"It was. Now, I'm pissed that apparently, they're fifty-fifty on whether my husband would actually date me."

"Try being like, a half a foot shorter than your model girlfriend, dude, and then see what they say…" 

Patrick glowered at him expectantly, and Pete knew better than to keep on arguing.

"Fine.  _ Fine _ ," he sighed, "but this time, you really gotta run with my plan, and do everything I say, right?"

"But - "

"Right?"

"Fine!" Patrick snapped, folding his arms. "Just tell me what we need to do."

\---

The footage was convincingly grainy and dark, like someone trying to take a video of a UFO ten years ago, before 40mp phone cameras and auto-stabilisation were a thing, and it was filmed at an angle that showed just enough, but not enough at all. The voices though, those were crystal clear; as was, if you listened carefully, the soft slappity-slap of skin against skin.

And it did work, as it happened, after an initial period of stunned silence in near-universal horror, and a hurried apology to Patrick's mom, who had apparently just followed the band's account. So it didn't matter whether the whole thing was real or not - and neither Patrick, nor Joe, would ever confirm to Pete whether it was, or it wasn't - but finally, the truth was out there and people were actually quite complimentary. Watching Joe preening smugly as he read emoji-strewn endorsements was kind of enough on its own, but it got the band's Instagram account banned for violating the terms of service, which was, in its own way, a double victory.

  
  



End file.
